Online Video and Video Sharing

10/06/2016

Happy Twitter-versary (for the nth time around this time), Jack Dorsey. Things haven’t been going well, it seems, but there’s a light at the end of the tunnel — Twitter may be acquired by someone somewhere in the tech (or entertainment) industry, perhaps.

To be perfectly fair, the company Dorsey inherited from his predecessor(s), including an array of former product leads as well as CEO Dick Costolo, wasn’t in that great of shape to begin. But Dorsey’s return was heralded as a return to form for Twitter, in the hope that he might come in and shake things up to the point that the company would finally turn around and make Wall Street Happy.

So in the last month or so, a lot has been made as to whether the company should remain independent or whether it makes sense as part of a larger empire that can devote more resources into growing it. There are natural arguments for each — Twitter is one of the go-to sources for news (and also sports!), but a company like Salesforce could pump additional life into it to get that user base growing more broadly. And perhaps the company once again needs new fresh blood.

And let’s look at the user base the company reported last quarter, which has been the main sticking point for Wall Street and Twitter:

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So, barely any growth whatsoever (and even a small drop-off at one point). Hmm. What about revenue growth? Under the leadership of Adam Bain this wasn’t a huge problem for a while, though everything still stems back to user growth.

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And Twitter’s still losing money:

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One last quick one, which isn’t exactly a chart — how much it’s paying for stock-based compensation:

So, you may be sensing a little bit of a trend: a big shift to live video, some attempts to combat harassment and other problems (though it hasn’t worked), and of course lackluster results under Dorsey.

It’s been a tough run for Dorsey, which may eventually be capped off with a final sale to a company. Anything can change at the last minute, of course, but for the time being it seems like Twitter needs to right itself — whether that’s through increasingly drastic internal changes or bringing in new leadership under new ownership to do just that. And there’s always next year!

Twitter’s third-quarter earnings come out later this month, and it’s kind of hard to believe that this may be the final time we see the guts of the company for the foreseeable future. It may end with a final sign-off like LinkedIn:

“In light of the pending merger, LinkedIn will not be updating its outlook for fiscal 2016 and will not be hosting a conference call for its second quarter 2016 business results.”

COMMENTARY: If you've followed my blog posts about Jack Dorsey and Twitter's performance, you know that I have not been very complimentary towards Jack Dorsey, and have been just as critical about Twitter's performance. Not to be forgotten is the number of key staffers who have chosen to leave the company since Dorsey took over as CEO. In addition to the exits, revenues have failed to meet investor expectations, with the stock price dropping to near lows, and Monthly Active Users (MAU's) stalling just over 300 million users since he took over the helm.

Although Twitter has aggressively moved towards more video content (Vine and Periscope), including live sporting event streams, at its face, the overall Twitter experience has remained about the same. The homepage is still an endless torrent of tweets, without any organization or personalization. It is very time consuming to review this mountainous torrent of tweets. The result is that users are missing out on news and information that is important to them.

Twitter now allows users to attach images and videos to their tweets without affecting the 140 character limit. This is a good thing, but only a superficial improvement that a lot of users don't even notice. This is not enough to improve the overall user experience and serve as an inducement to increase user engagement and attract new users.

Twitter requires radical changes not just superficial improvements. It's a huge product design problem that must be resolved. You literally need to go back to square one and introduce an entirely new Twitter with a user interface (UI) that is unrecognizable from what you see today, and that is simple, user-friendly and intuitive. Here are a few changes that I think are greatly needed.

To combat the avalanche of tweet traffic, users should be required to classify their tweets by type (example: politics, social media, big data, legal, sports, games, fashion, personal, etc.). Users should be able to select a type before they can post it. I follow political tweets a lot, so I should be able to view all political tweets and see what's trending within that type (example: #VPdebate, #presidentialdebate, #potus, #trump, #clinton, etc.).

Live streaming event tweets should be separate from other tweets so that they clearly stand out. They should also be classified by type, and users should be able to see which live streaming events are trending (example: #presdentialdebate, #sundaynightfootball, #spaceXlaunch, #liveearthconcert, etc.).

An idea that I have proposed before includes classified ads. Twitter could be a great classified ad site, but classified ads are lost in the torrent of tweets. Classified ads would appear separate from regular news and information tweets, and would be classified by type (example: rentals, autos, household, garage sales, personals, etc.). Classified ads would be a great way for Twitter to generate additional revenues that could rival those of Craigslist. I don't know why this hasn't been done before. If I don't want to see ads within my tweet stream, I should be offered the option of paying a small fee for that privelege. Another potential revenue stream.

There you have it. If you have other ideas, don't hesitate to post them in the comment section.

11/05/2015

Marketers are reprioritizing video advertising budgets, shifting their spend from traditional to digital video,according to a recent report from Aol.

The report was based on data from an annual survey of nearly 300 brands, agencies, and publishers.

Nine in ten ad buyers say they are are shifting spend from linear TV to digital channels, with 10% of television budgets being reallocated on average.

Some 88% of marketers who are moving TV dollars toward digital channels say they are shifting that ad spend to some form of video, such as desktop, mobile, or over-the-top (OTT).

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Below, additional key findings from the report.

Digital Video Ad Types

Buyers, agencies, and brands are all most optimistic about the growth of mobile video advertising, with more than 60% of respondents in all three groups expecting budget increases.

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Buyers say the biggest challenges with mobile video advertising are attribution/measurement (55% cite as an issue) and cross-device targeting (50%).

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Programmatic Ad Buying

Some 27% of brands surveyed say they have already implemented in-house programmatic ad buying; 42% plan to do so in the next year.

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About the research: The report was based on data from an annual survey of nearly 300 brands, agencies, and publishers.

COMMENTARY: If you have an opportunity to review the latest survey published by Mixpo, you may find it as interesting as I did. According to its survey, more advertisers plan to run video ads or promotional content on Facebook than YouTube this year.

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The survey includes “125 agencies, brands, and publishers” and aims to show how advertisers are driving the trend to reach consumers on social channels. In 2014, 77.8% of respondents ran a video ad campaign on YouTube compared to only 63% on Facebook. And yes, those two platforms were the overwhelming winners when it came to this question. On the heels of all of the recent Facebook buzz, it’s no wonder the numbers jumped to show that 87% plan to run an ad on Facebook, compared to 81.5% on YouTube in 2015. There was also a big jump in agencies planning to use Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat:

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Most Important Metric: Fan Engagement

Not surprisingly fan engagement was the winner when it comes to most important metrics for video ads on social. Shares, conversions, time spent watching and views were the next most important categories (in that order) but the respondents showed that social marketing is more than just getting exposure, it’s about creating buzz and building relationships with fans.

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Whether these agencies actually run ads or are merely planning to do it has yet to be seen, but the fact of the matter is that it’s about more than YouTube now when you talk about video marketing. Despite a slight bump in unique visitors to YouTube in March and a continuing decline for Facebook that has been happening since last August, the agencies in this survey see Facebook as the more important destination for ads.

YouTube and Video Advertising: A Shift coming?

Perhaps I use Facebook differently, but I find that I rarely see or interact with a video ad on Facebook whereas on YouTube, I feel inundated with them on a daily basis. Maybe that is why YouTube e-mailed partners about a major shift happening in their format, possibly as soon as this year?

The widespread use of programs that block advertising content has left YouTube searching for alternate ways to not only make money, but solve the problem of ads that annoy viewers. The video giant plans to offer an ad-free subscription service to its most valued partners in a new model for the site expected to cost around $10 per month and would remove ads on channels who have opted in to the deal:

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From users I’ve talked to, that price could be a bit steep for a service they have come to think of as a “free service”. Conversely, an ad-free viewing experience would be a win for viewers and creators. Viewers because they would be able to see more of the content they love without being interrupted with ads and for creators because video views would likely increase for the site based on this change.

Depending on the number of viewers who opted in to this deal and the way payouts were calculated with YouTube, it’s even possible that creators could earn more revenue than they did previously if this new venture is a success. On the heels of the Mixpo survey, it seems as if YouTube is the destination for viewers and creators but Facebook’s personal data may be giving it the edge with advertisers in 2015.

04/30/2015

Many things were written about the new video calling featureFacebook launched Wednesday, April 22—that it couldn’t compare to the new Google+ Hangouts, for example, because it didn’t have a group feature, or that it should be admired for its drop-dead simplicity.

But one thing that wasn’t written about was that the new feature that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg trumpeted as being "awesome" was dreamt up almost entirely by a single baby-faced product designer, a recent hire who was tossed onto the project less than a month after stepping onto the company’s Mountain View campus last fall.

That designer, Rob Mason, pictured below, spoke with Fast Company about how he went about envisioning Facebook’s entrant into the video communication space—and along the way gave us insight both into why Facebook made some of the design choices it did (No mute button? What’s up with that?) and into Facebook’s overall process for designing new features.

Facebook's Rob Mason is the designer of the new Messenger Video Call app (Click Image To Enlarge)

Mason, 22, a recent graduate from England, arrived at Facebook last October. Before that, his employment history consisted mainly of doing contract design work on third-party Facebook apps.

Despite that seeming paucity of experience, Facebook leaders apparently didn’t hesitate to dump the important new feature into Mason’s virgin hands.

Soleio Cuervo, one of Facebook’s design veterans tells Fast Company.

"We have a pretty rigorous process for hiring new designers."

Design at Facebook is a leadership role, he says. The company looks for people with strong vision, strong soup-to-nuts technical and design skills, and strong abilities to drive consensus.

Cuervo says.

"When we looked at Rob’s portfolio and the projects he had created on his own, we saw they were highly focused, dirt simple, and very clean. That high level of focus was something we thought was appropriate for this product."

Whereas design teams at other companies are inundated with marketing and product requirement documents, the only guidance Mason was given was the fact that the company would be implementing Skype’s video capabilities and that it was up to him to figure out what the new feature should do.

Mason then buckled down to the project, putting existing video chat products through the paces, sketching out new ideas, and building rough prototypes.

A month later, Mason sat down with Zuckerberg and vice president of product Chris Cox for his first design review. (Unlike at other companies where designers are separated by oodles of bureaucracy from the top dogs, at Facebook, designers work directly with Zuckerberg and Cox to hammer out new features.)

Mason pitched his idea:

"A really minimal experience with none of the clutter or legacy of any other product on the market."

Mason says.

"Making a video call today is very complex. You have to make sure you and the other person are using the same software. If you’re not, you have to install that software on your computer. You have to create an account. And you have to get your friend’s user name and enter that into your software. There’s a huge untapped market of people who would get lots of value out of video calling, but it’s too complicated. They don’t even know where to start."

Which is why Facebook went in the completely opposite direction.

Mason says.

"If you want to send a message to someone in Facebook, you just click on them and type in your message. Video calling should be the same."

Over the following months, working in concert with Zuckerberg and Cox, and Philip Su, the engineer who built the feature, Mason refined the idea and nailed down its essential elements, including:

No Controls

Once you’re inside the video calling window (you’ve called another person and they’ve accepted your call), the window in which you’re speaking to each other has no controls, other than the standard ones (full screen, minimize, and close).

If the goal is simply to enable two people to communicate, Mason says, bells and whistles risk getting in the way—even a mute button, which you’d think would be a core control for a calling service.

Mason says.

"It seems like such a simple feature, but if you accidentally mute a call, you can end up in a state where you have video but no sound. It adds a lot of confusion."

Placing The Call Window At The Top

Although you can move the call window around, when it first appears, Facebook positions it at the top of the screen, right below your camera. That way, when you’re looking at the person you’re talking with, your eyes are looking in the same general place as the camera, which increases the chance that it captures some measure of eye contact.

Similarly, the picture of you that’s embedded in the call window also appears at the top. That, says Mason, is so that if you check out your own picture during the call, you don’t lose eye contact with the person you’re speaking with.

Making Your Picture Tiny

The picture of you that gets embedded in the call window is noticeably small, thumbprint-sized, rather than profile-photo-size, or larger.

Mason says.

"That’s so that you’re not self-conscious. You can see that you’re in the frame, but you can’t see any imperfections."

Keeping The Video Window In The Foreground

Try bringing another window to the forefront of your screen when you’re on a Facebook video call, and you’ll quickly find that you can’t. That’s entirely intentional, Mason says, and again harks back to the idea of making video calls simple and easy even for the most novice users.

Mason says.

"It’s really important for our members to be confident that they know when they’re being seen and heard. With the video window always on top, you never forget you’re in a call. Cuervo says that, in an increasingly real-time world, making video calls—to chat with family and friends—is going to become increasingly commonplace. Requiring people to install software and click through setup wizards is "an archaic way of thinking about how people want to interact with their friends."

Facebook’s new service, on the other hand, is the kind of typical low-end disruption that Clayton Christensen pinpoints in his business classic The Innovator’s Dilemma—a product that can seem underwhelming at first when compared with legacy products but that strikes a chord with an emerging class of customer.

Cuervo says.

"My parents can now call me. All those years of frustration with video chat clients will finally be gone."

COMMENTARY: Facebook’s introduction of free mobile video calling as part of its mobile Messenger app, puts it in direct competition with Skype, Google Chat and Hangouts and Apple’s FaceTime. Previously, Messenger allowed users to make voice calls; the new feature comes as other social media platforms have unveiled new capabilities including video calling.

To use the Messenger video call function, Facebook members just have to tap a video icon within the app and choose the contact they want to call. They can also open up a video call from within a text or voice call if they feel the need.

In one major difference from its competitors, Messenger allows users to make video calls between different operating systems -- for example, with one user calling from an Android device and the other user receiving the call on iOS. cThat’s an important distinction from Facetime, which like most other Apple products is exclusive of other operating systems.

Video calling on Facebook Messenger works through a mobile data connection and WiFi. This means that someone with a strong LTE signal on their iPhone in the U.S. can still have a video chat with someone in a third-world country that has a weaker 3G signal on their Android device. Facebook is also currently experimenting with group video calling and video stabilization, according to TechCrunch.

The video calling feature for Facebook Messenger is currently available for iOS and Android users in Belgium, Canada, Croatia, Denmark, France, Greece, Ireland, Laos, Lithuania, Mexico, Nigeria, Norway, Oman, Poland, Portugal, the U.K., the U.S. and Uruguay. It will gradually roll out to other countries over the next several weeks.

Here is a video that demonstrates how video calling on Facebook Messenger works:

According to Facebook, over 600 million people use Messenger every month. The social media juggernaut recently introduced Messenger Platform, giving app developers the capability to integrate their products with Messenger, as well as Business on Messenger for business-to-consumer communications.

In March 2015, Facebook announced that users can send money to friends via Messenger, pitting it against other peer-to-peer payment services like Square, Venmo, and Snapcash, introduced last year by Snapchat and powered by Square.

The service will become available over the next few months for Android, iOS, and desktop users. Facebook is offering the service free, with no transaction fees, and currently says it doesn’t plan to monetize it. It also emphasized that the service only allows payments between individual Facebook users, not payments to businesses.

03/26/2013

Some 178 million Americans—roughly 83.3% of the US Internet audience—watched more than 33 billion video content views in February 2013, with Google Sites generating the highest number at 11.3 billion and Facebook reaching its all-time high of 558 million, according to data from the comScore Video Metrix service.

Among the top 10 video properties, Google Sites had the highest average engagement.

Meanwhile, Americans viewed 9.9 billion video ads in February with Google Sites ranking first, delivering an all-time high of 2.2 billion ads, nearly one-quarter of the all video ads delivered during the month.

Below, additional findings from comScore.

Top 10 Video Content Properties by Unique Viewers

Google Sites, driven primarily by YouTube.com, ranked as the top online video content property in February with 150.7 million unique viewers, followed by Facebook with 61.2 million, VEVO with 49.5 million, NDN with 46.3 million, and Yahoo Sites with 43.6 million.

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Google Sites had the highest average engagement among the top ten properties in February with 1,024.7 minutes per viewer (MPV).

Facebook was near the bottom in viewer engagement with an average of 19.9 MPV. Among the top 10 video sites, only Amazon recorded lower engagement with 12.6 MPV.

The duration of the average online content video was 5.6 minutes, while the average online video ad was 0.4 minutes.

Top 10 Video Ad Properties by Video Ads Viewed

Americans viewed 9.9 billion video ads in February, with Google Sites ranking first with its all-time high of 2.2 billion ads. BrightRoll Video Network came in second with 1.6 billion, followed by Hulu with 1.4 billion, Adap.tv with 1.4 billion, and LiveRail.com with 1 billion.

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Viewers spent a total of 3.8 billion minutes watching video ads in February, with BrightRoll Video Network delivering the highest duration of video ads at 859 million minutes.

Meanwhile, video ads reached more than 50% of the total US population 63 times during the month on average.

Hulu delivered the highest frequency of video ads to its viewers with an average of 61, while CBS Interactive and Google Sites tied for second with an average of 23 ads per viewer.

Top 10 YouTube Partner Channels by Unique Viewers

Video music channel VEVO maintained the top position in comScore's ranking of YouTube partners with 48.2 million viewers in February. Fullscreen held on to the No. 2 position with 36.8 million viewers, followed by Maker Studios with 30.5 million, Warner Music with 26 million, and ZEFR (formerly MovieClips) with 23.8 million.

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Among the top 10 YouTube partners, Machinima recorded the highest engagement (61 minutes per viewer), followed by Maker Studios (42 minutes per viewer).

However, VEVO streamed the greatest number of videos (514 million), followed by Machinima (374 million).

Video ads accounted for 23% of all videos viewed and 2% of all minutes spent viewing video online.

COMMENTARY: On July 15, 2012, South Korean rapper PSY set a new YouTube world record by surpassing 1 billion views on YouTube for his video "Gangnam Style."